


The Uncorrupted Tongue

by AnamaryArmygram



Series: Death and the Maiden [1]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Additional Tags May Be Added, Angst, Catholic Characters, Crying, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Sex, Loss of Virginity, Love Triangle, Manipulative!Christine, Masturbation, Morning After, Necrophile!Christine, Non-Sexual Bondage, Objectification, POV Female Character, Pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Priest, Regret, Religious Content, Sacrament of Confession, Sequel, Set During the Two Weeks, hagiography, not smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-13 19:04:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10519929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnamaryArmygram/pseuds/AnamaryArmygram
Summary: After her night with Erik, Christine is racked with guilt. In the ensuing days she turns to religion for comfort, still fighting her continuing attraction to Erik even as she schemes to escape from him.





	1. Aftermath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a sequel to “The Dead Hand.” That story came from a fairly weird place; this one is an attempt to reckon with the same subject matter in a different, and hopefully saner, way.
> 
> You don't need to have read “The Dead Hand” before reading this story. There's only one reference that isn't self-explanatory (the conversation with Agnès); I've reprinted that bit in the endnote to this chapter.

_I can't take a breath without seeing Mr. Death…_  
_But I can't see Mr. Death_  
_If I don't take that breath_  
          – The Fat Man and Team Fat, “Mr. Death”

* * *

In her dream, Christine was in a closed coffin with a dead man, pressed near to the remains of him – brittle bones and rotting garments and mould. Even in the blackness of the little box, she saw him; even in its airlessness, she smelled him, dry and musty and choking, something far worse than smell of fresh decay. The skin was half-gone from his face, and his lips were tattered. His jaw hung open. He had no tongue.

She took a deep breath of the fetid air and screamed, and her scream made no sound. She knew, then, that what she breathed was not air but somehow air's opposite, vacuum made palpable. And she knew that it would destroy her.

Still she breathed, the way a drowning person breathes water. She could not stop.

* * *

When she awoke, Christine was in an open coffin with a living man. Erik. Poor, horrible Erik. She lay atop him, her face beside his shrunken face, her limbs sprawled out as far as the confines of the coffin would allow, covering his body with her own as though protecting him from blows.

Images of the previous night came cutting into her brain. It seemed impossible that she had really done the things she seemed to remember doing – losing her fear of Erik altogether, drawing him into her excess of morbid fantasy, and finally surrendering her virginity, not (as she might have hoped to) in the natural way to the man she hoped to marry, but rather through the movement of her captor's dead hand.

Perhaps the bulk of it had been a dream, a voluptuous dream before the horrible one. But some part of it must have been real, or else what was she doing _here_?

Erik was asleep. His chest rose and fell beneath her; his breath whistled, thin and cool and sour, in her ear. She felt unclean, as though his condition were infectious; she felt that she had caught the smell of death. And so, thinking of the nice little bathroom that connected to her bedchamber, she raised herself away from him, bracing herself on the side of the coffin, trying not to disturb him at all.

She was quite naked, and as she moved her thighs apart she felt a chill between them. They were sticky.

She had really done it, all of it.

Dear God.

* * *

She stayed in her room a long time, praying mechanically the prayer of the publican: “Lord, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.” Tears gathered behind her eyes and sobs stagnated in her throat, and the feeling – that sense of congestion, that desire for release – appalled her because of how it resembled the frenzied arousal that had filled her body the night before.

She heard Erik rising and moving around. After a time he tapped on her door. “Are you awake, Christine?” She said nothing. He continued: “I am awake. I slept very well. I imagine that married men always sleep well.”

Here she let out a full-throated sob – she could not have said why – and breathlessly hurried to open the door.

He was smiling – his gash of a mouth beaming, his deep eye-sockets crimped.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

The smile fell away. “What do you mean?” His voice was soft. “You have given me a great gift. Why should you be sorry for that?”

It was a fair question. There was no doubt that the whole affair was wickedly wrong in the sight of God – but Erik was her accomplice in that, not her victim. Why did she feel the urge to apologize to _him_?

Looking again at his face – so horribly ugly, so pathetically uncomprehending – she knew why. She had approached him not as a human being, but as the embodiment of her morbid daydream. She had, without realizing it, treated him no differently from the inert puppet-body Agnès had spoken of.

He had complied willingly, yes – but would he have done so if he had known that she had not approached him out of any real affection, but only for the thrill of lying with the dead?

There was no way to explain this to him. At best, he would not understand it. At worst, it would provoke him to rage.

“I apologize,” she said, “because I can never give you that gift again.” She continued rapidly: “I have sinned against God. I must go to confession. I must do penance and amend my life. And that means that I can never again do anything like we did last night.” This was all perfectly true, and yet she felt as though she were lying.

“Not until you are married,” he said.

“Not until I am married,” she replied absently.

* * *

A few days later, with no warning, he bound her hands behind her back and took her in the dead of night to a house on a street she did not know. He accompanied her up the front steps, his hand cold and steel-hard on her arm.

“What is this place?” she whispered. “Why have you brought me here?”

“This is the house of a priest,” said Erik, and he must have felt how she trembled at that, for he looked down at her with a weary expression and explained: “You are here to make your confession – _so that you will not be unhappy any more_.”

He knocked softly, and the door was opened by a fat, grey-haired man in clerical dress.

“I'll be watching,” said Erik. “Do as I told you, and don't keep her too long.”

Christine stepped over the threshold and the priest closed the door behind her. “Hello,” he said with a tired smile. “I am Father Tondeur. We will be going into my study.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “The small door next to my writing desk – I have left it ajar so you can push it open. While you are speaking to me, turn away suddenly and go out by that door. My housekeeper is upstairs; she will hide you. I hope that Erik will think you have left the house.”

“No. Please, no. Just hear my confession and let me return to him.”

“My child, do you not understand? We are trying to help you escape!”

She looked up at him, looked him in the eye. “You _know_ Erik.”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “I know him.”

“Then you know that the danger to me if I stay with him is nothing against the danger to you if you help me. I need a priest, not a champion. I will escape another day.”

Fr. Tondeur sighed. “Very well.”

He ushered her into the study. He sat in a great armchair, and she knelt with her back to him, as is done where there is no screen. This left her facing the single large window.

“Before we begin,” she said, “Will you take off my bonnet and put it over my face?”

“For what reason?”

“So that I can speak freely.”

The priest plucked out her hairpins and pulled the bonnet away. It was small and rather stiff, and as he brought it down over her face, Christine imagined it looked a bit like a fencing mask. “Now,” she said, “he cannot read my lips.”

And so Christine made her confession. Like the geese in the old story, she took her time. Before she finished, the tears were dripping down her chin. The old priest, who proved to be a most understanding confessor, counseled her at length and then pronounced the words of absolution.

The very moment he stopped speaking, the window swung open. Cold night air gusted into the room, and the voice of Erik was borne on the draft. “You have had her long enough, Thomas. I saw you absolve her. Return her to me.”

Fr. Tondeur lifted the bonnet from Christine's face. As he pressed onto the back of her head, he leaned in to whisper: “This is your last chance.”

“A priest, not a champion,” she murmured.

Erik met them at the front door.

* * *

For the next couple of days Christine felt – as she always felt after confession – clear-headed and reasonable. She did her best to play the part of the caged bird, to win his trust while she watched for a way of escape.

Very often she gave herself little lectures in a schoolmarmish mental voice. When she was frightened of him, when he seemed like a ghost or an ogre, she said to herself: “He is a man. A madman, an ugly man, but a _mere_ man.” And when she was attracted to him, when the memory of their encounter in the coffin made her wince with guilty wanting, she said to herself: “He is a man. Not a corpse, not Death itself, but a _living_ man.”

But as the time since her absolution continued to elapse, she found herself fearing him less and less and desiring him more and more. It did not help that he saw fit sometimes to escort her along the shore of the subterranean lake and to row her across its still, dark waters. Within the personable little house, her passions were dampened by the sheer ordinariness of her surroundings. But the cellar outside, with its Stygian somberness, produced the opposite effect.

Still she prayed, and lectured herself, and rebuked her mind when it began to wander. Remembering the example of St. Louis Gonzaga, who mortified his eyes by keeping them downcast from the magnificent artworks in his father's home and who fought off nausea in order to look plague victims in the face, she fixed her eyes on Erik only when he disgusted her – and turned them away when she found herself looking at him with lust.

Her avoidance was not perfect. During this time Erik mentioned, here and there, the upcoming masked ball. He seemed to enjoy being secretive about his plans – but on one occasion he did speak in a gloating tone about _what an impression he would make_. His face, which seemed more skull-like than ever, bore an expression of fiendish glee, and the twisting of his hand as he gesticulated reminded her of the way his bony fingers had pierced her sex.

She retreated into her room, her body burning, her eyes filled with tears. She could not tolerate it any more – she must put an end to her desire, even at the price of sin.

Even in this extremity, the schoolmarmish voice butted in with counsel: “Who is the man you love – not lust after, but love? At least turn your thoughts to him.” And so, as her hand worked away, she fixed her mind on Raoul. She pretended that it was his image and not Erik's that had provoked her to this, that her longing at that moment was (as it had been before her captivity) for her handsome, sweet, and pleasant swain – not for a madman who smelled like the grave.

Afterward, sick with guilt, she washed her hands and huddled in bed, berating herself for her weakness. At length she drifted into a reverie in which she imagined explaining herself to Fr. Tondeur. In her mind she knelt before him in a real confessional, screened by a metal grating that did not really hide anything, so that she could see the compassion on his face as he told her she must not despair.

She said an act of contrition and went to sleep.

The next night Erik told her: “Be sure to dress yourself very nicely tonight, for we are going out – _out_ – into the world, and we must make a pleasant appearance in case we are seen.”

As she made her toilette and wondered about this, a plan suddenly occurred to her. She made a quick mental reckoning of what day it must be, and then took a stub of pencil and a sheet of paper – her own paper, which Erik, despite keeping her incommunicado, had whimsically supplied for her. She began writing: _Go to the masked ball at the Opera on the night after to-morrow. At twelve o'clock…_

Lacking either an envelope or a seal, she merely folded the letter up thoroughly. She addressed it from memory, writing in heavy, dark strokes so that, even if many feet trod on it, the lines would not rub away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks are due to the real “Fr. Tondeur,” who encouraged me to continue working on this story.
> 
> The folk-tale about the geese can be read [here](https://fairytalez.com/the-fox-and-the-geese/).
> 
> The passage from the first story is as follows:
>
>> She remembered a conversation she had once had with another member of the chorus, an older girl named Agnès. Why she had even been talking with Agnès, Christine could not recall. But somehow the conversation had come around to this: “Have you wondered,” Christine asked, “what it would be like to kiss a dead man?”
>> 
>> “A dead man?” cried Agnès. “Heavens, no!”
>> 
>> Christine blushed and lowered her eyes. But Agnès, nibbling at the edge of her thumbnail, went on: “Unless you mean only _just_ dead, so that he looked as though he were sleeping.” She smiled slyly. “Then you could do whatever you liked to him and no one would ever know.”
>> 
>> Christine turned away, murmuring, “That's not what I meant.” It was, in fact, the opposite of what she meant. _Her_ dead man would be _really_ dead, decaying, passing into eternity one particle at a time. And he would, at the same time, be something more than an inert plaything – dead, but not lifeless.
>> 
>> When Christine imagined kissing a dead man, _the dead man kissed back_.


	2. The Martyr's Tongue

Erik’s voice _was_ remarkable, and all the more so for coming from such an afflicted body. He seemed to be healthy only in those areas which concerned his singing: his ribcage was large and well-shaped, his lungs powerful, his timbre sweet and resonant despite (if not because of) his missing nose. His diction, too, was excellent, for the deformity that had blasted every other soft part of his body – leaving him disvisaged, emaciated, and a eunuch – had somehow spared his tongue.

Christine first noticed this on the night he took her to the house of the priest. While she made her confession she wept with remorse; afterward, she wept with relief. By the time they had returned to the lake house, she was languishing with nervous exhaustion. He held her near, as he had not dared to do previously, and sang her a sort of lullaby. Their faces were close together; she caught sight of his tongue; and in her pious cast of mind she supposed that God Himself had brought it to her attention at that moment – in order to encourage her.

Let me explain. In the fourteenth century, a priest known as John Nepomucene was confessor to the Queen of Bohemia, whose royal husband, a cruel and suspicious man, mistrusted her virtue. The king confronted John, demanding a report of the queen's confessions, which John was obliged to refuse. The king used every measure at his disposal, from bribery to trickery to torture; John remained silent. At last, having angered the king beyond all measure, the steadfast little priest was sentenced to die by drowning.

His tomb in the Prague cathedral developed into a site of devotion. Three hundred years later, that tomb was opened. Beneath what had once been a jawbone, one of the workman spotted something pink.

In tribute to his silence, the tongue of the martyr had been preserved from all decay.

Christine Daaé knew this story from her schooldays. It is told to young people making their first confession, to reassure them that any priest would sooner die than betray their secrets. You can see why, so soon after the most difficult confession of her life, a glimpse of the perfect tongue in that skeletal head of Erik's must have seemed like a providential sign.


End file.
